Drone chimney survey in Sidmouth

Sidmouth's Regency and early Victorian core is unusually complete for a Devon seaside town, with rendered and painted elevations, ornate ironwork and roof geometries that were built to be looked at, complete with parapet gutters, dressed stacks and lead-lined valleys rather than the plain terraced chimney found in a working town. Later villas climb the valley sides with simpler stacks, and post-war housing at Sidford and Sidbury carries plainer chimneys again, well away from the esplanade's more decorative stock.

The town sits in a steep-sided valley hemmed in by Peak Hill and Salcombe Hill, both rising well over 150 metres either side, and that shape funnels wind off the sea straight up through the town rather than letting it dissipate. Salt reaches the esplanade properties hard, and the steep hills either side create turbulent, gusting conditions specifically around ridges and stacks, which is a different and less predictable load than a straightforward onshore wind.

On a stack with the kind of ornate lead-lined parapet gutter work common on the esplanade, that turbulence works at joints and fixings from changing directions rather than one consistent side, which makes a full, close, all-round photographic record more useful here than on a plainer stack that only ever takes weather from one quarter.

Complex Regency roof geometry, dressed stacks and lead-lined parapet gutters are hard to read properly from the ground even with binoculars, because so much of the detail that matters sits behind a parapet or in a valley gutter invisible from the street. A close aerial survey gets the standoff and the angle a valley-floor view cannot, without scaffolding against an esplanade elevation that is often listed.

Connaught Gardens and the clifftop paths either side of the town give a clear sense of just how enclosed Sidmouth's valley setting actually is, hemmed in tightly enough that weather funnelled up from the sea has nowhere else to go. That enclosure is as relevant to a stack survey as the town's Regency architecture, because it is the shape of the valley, as much as the building style, that decides how hard a particular stack is worked.

Sidford and Sidbury, further up the valley, carry plainer post-war stock with simpler stacks that see less of the funnelled coastal wind than the esplanade itself, which is worth knowing if a property sits toward the edge of town rather than right on the front.

Thatch survives in the villages just outside Sidmouth proper, and a thatched roof's chimney needs a wider clearance and a different flashing approach around the stack than the town's own lead-lined slate valleys, precisely because of the fire risk a close-fitting flashing would otherwise create against the thatch itself.

The esplanade's more decorative stacks often carry taller, more ornate clay pots than a plainer terrace elsewhere would, in keeping with the Regency taste for a roofline that looked as considered as the facade beneath it, and a taller pot naturally carries more of the valley's turbulent wind loading through its own flaunching joint.